UNDERTAKING GENDER IN DEATH

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UNDERTAKING GENDER IN DEATH

A Dissection of Transhumanist and Death Positive Understandings of Being Human

Alexandra Løvås Kristinnsdottir

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in

Gender Studies

Centre for Gender Studies University of Oslo

Blindern, Norway

29.11.2019

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Undertaking Gender In Death. A Dissection of Transhumanist and Death Positive Understandings of Being Human

http://www.duo.uio.no/

Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo

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Abstract

This thesis examines how we might say that death is gendered, and what that might mean for feminist questions of justice. To explore these questions, I use two movements that are in a discursive struggle for definitional power over death: death positivity and transhumanism. I consider the movements’ use of the concepts ‘the self’, ‘the body’ and ‘nature’, as well as gender, and how these negotiate meanings in death. The movements propose very different solutions to the problem that death poses, despite some common motifs, based in their different relationships to the above concepts. I suggest that transhumanism, a radical futuristic movement, aligns with an anthropocentric understanding of the human, which causes problems like climate change. We are, at the moment, in an unprecedented timescape called the Anthropocene, characterized by human intervention in the natural world, revolving around a subject that positions the human as above and outside the material of nature. This human self is justified in its exploitation of those that do not conform to its ideal form of being human, those who are othered through their difference from this ideal self. One of these types of difference is gender. The othered, human and non-human, are subject to

necropolitical exertions of power, power that decides life and death. I argue that dislodging the human at the center of the world to address its problems starts with acknowledging death as a phenomenon. Death positivity emerges as a challenge to these unequal necropolitics, where they advocate for others’ participation in discursive constructions of death, as well as empowerment through their personal relationships to death. The death positive movement serves as a practice of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) in deeply troubling times.

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Acknowledgements

Every text is a a part of an ongoing conversation, owing to a system of interrelated influences. For helping me stay with the trouble of writing this thesis, I wish to offer my thanks.

My supervisor Sara E. S. Orning, for helping me through the monstrous birthing process it is to write a longform research project. Mine was more drawn out than most, and being a doula is work on its own, even if it is for the work of others. Your guidance has been productive, thoughtful and always kind, and I am so grateful to have had someone who practices what they preach be my guide. Deeply, sincerely, heartfelt thanks.

The other supervisors whose presences were brief, but whose interest and input still shaped my thoughts. Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, for the enthusiasm you showed for my ideas.

Agnes Bolsø, for theoretical wrangling and a sympathetic cup of coffee. You are both inspirational in fighting the power; thank you.

Professor Patrick W. Galbraith, whose quick observation of death positivity as relevant for mass death concerns sparked a cascade that finally helped me realize how I could write my

thesis. ありがとうございました.

To my fellow students at the Centre for Gender Studies at UiO, who have lived in the trouble with me.

The Queer Death Studies network, for compassionate collegiality.

My friends and family, for offering shelter, nourishment and emotional support.

My ex-partner, for support in emotionally difficult times and facilitating circumstances to let me write. And then breaking up with me at a critical point in the thesis. Thank you, up yours.

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1 Introduction

But death has remained for me an elusive topic: far too grand, far too entangled with almost everything that gives meaning to our lives to be written into some semblance of clarity. [...] One may as well write about the history of the meaning of life.

—Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead (2016)

It might seem like an odd question: “why should we¹ care about death?”. Doesn’t everyone care about death already? Is the enduring, eternal dilemma of existence not about the

meaning of life and death? Death is hardly possible to avoid, either through media exposure and front pages about wars and mortal accidents, or more intimately through one’s own or others’ bereavement. We are told to eat healthily and exercise to have longer lives, and delay the visibility of aging through creams and operations. All these reveal an underlying

preoccupation with death and dying. And yet, death is not an everyday topic. It is taboo, hidden away, not spoken about. It is the absolute most commonplace thing that happens, and yet entirely extraordinary. Death shifts lives, it inspires grand gestures, it moves us in ways few other things do. When we memento mori, remember our mortality, a fire is lit for us to do, whatever; writing a bucket list and crossing off its items; coupling together and having children; leaving partners, quitting our job, selling what we own and moving across the globe to start anew. From death, stoppage, comes initiative and movement.

Where death is, we are. It should be impossible to think of being human without also remembering that we are mortal, and yet death is relegated to a twilight zone in the collective consciousness. This ambiguous role of death—both present and absent, real and unreal—

disallows reflection on how being human and its particularities relate to death. By this I mean that since death “isn’t” (taboo, unspeakable) until it suddenly “is” (occurring by bereavement,

1 By “we” I am referring to a generalized human subject, locally and ethnically obscured, constructed in the terriory called “the West” or “the Global North”. I use this “we” as it is the privileged subject within the anglosphere from which my research arises, and it reflects the “who” my empirical material aligns itself with.

Both movements for change in death understandings, death positivity and transhumanism, are directed towards this amorphous, particular yet generalized subject as their recipient. I align myself with this, despite its problems, as a matter of economy.

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for example), our experience of it defaults to a general subject understanding of the human.

There seems to be a silent presupposition that gender, as well as the many other categories of life that shape identity, are not at work in death and the understanding of it. Rather, death is conceptualized as an insular and individual undertaking, a quintessential moment of the self.

In the context that I am writing and from the examples I draw on in this thesis, I, quite conversely, argue that understandings of that self is oriented around the figure of the

anthropocentric male subject. The silence surrounding death makes it difficult to disentangle the many categories that shape individual and collective lives, and so we are stuck with an inadequate and reductive understanding of humans in death. There is a certain privilege that is apparent in this; death can only remain distant from people’s lives insofar as these lives are not systematically inundated with poverty, violence, and disease. To be able to imagine oneself as immortal arises from a place of privilege. The old adage is that death makes us all equal, but death does not come to us equally and the impact of deaths are not equal.

1.1 Research questions and theoretical background

The guiding questions for this thesis are based in the assumption that death can affect people unequally and remains as such at least partially because it is taboo. The taboo quality of death makes distinguishing how it relates to dimensions of life, such as gender, sexuality, or race, challenging and sometimes even inconceivable. How can we talk about the entrenching inequality of a taboo phenomenon, when the taboo inhibits even talking about it at all?

Taking reparative action toward these inequalities starts with acknowledging that experiences of death are not homogenous despite the phenomenon’s universality, and researching how categories of identity may figure in death. As an attempt to fulfill the premises set out by this postulate, the guiding research questions for this thesis are: how can death be a gendered phenomenon? What are some implications of death being gendered for feminist questions of justice?

With the latter question, I mean two things. I take discursive participation in the meaning of death and the opportunity to decide the circumstances of one’s death as the ways in which access to justice in death can be achieved. If death can be gendered, which I argue that it can, it is implicated as an arena for feminist questions of power. Gender structures are used as justifications for differential treament, oppression and violence (de Beauvoir 2010;

Plumwood 1991). The exertion of such power is necropolitical, “the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (Mbembe 2003, 11). Achille Mbembe uses this term

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largely in relation to state exertion of power, which is different from my employment of it. I use Mbembe’s term here as a backdrop to emphasize that negotiations of death ultimately may have consequences that are fatal; the humanity accorded to a subject has consequences for the violence that is justifiable to exert on that subject. Participating in defining the

contents of death, and remarking who are impacted by it in virtue of their exclusion from the ideally human, is a move to challenge that unfair, unjust exertion.

To answer these questions, I consider engagement with death at the level of ideas.

Because ‘death’ is an amorphous concept, universally recognized as a phenomenon but not universally agreed upon as to what it means for being human, my focus is on specific

representations of ways of viewing death. I am not investigating how individual difference—

the particular circumstances of one’s identity (Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002)—exists in singular deaths, but rather how activism and intellectual labor on death can be said to reveal gendered relationships to death. I do this through two movements—transhumanism and death positivity—whose ideological underpinnings are anchored in what death is and ought to be.

Their approaches to the is-ought of death are further based in the movements beliefs of how concepts such as ‘nature’, ‘the body’, ‘the self’ and gender matter for human being(s). By looking at explicit uses of these concepts and how they discursively inform each other, I am trying to untangle the implicit influence of gender on their understandings. That is not to say that these concepts are neatly separable from each other. They are quite contingent in mutual constructions of meaning, where the contents may overlap for some associations, but not others. Furthermore, these associations and the valuations of these are different in death positivity and transhumanism. But precisely in the different operationalization of these concepts is where the movements’ productive potential lies.

To do the analysis that the complicated interrelatedness of these concepts require, I use a range of tools and theoretical frameworks. I base my claim that death is socially

constructed in a historical focus on the shifting contents of death through time, by example of Thomas Laqueur and Phillippe Ariès. Thanatology (death studies) and cultural studies of death, which Laqueur and Ariès operate within, enable me to talk about death as a conditional truth, a real material phenomenon that is nonetheless culturally interpreted and understood through its immaterial elements. I assume that different ‘deathways’ (Bradbury 1999, 1), or cultural ways of doing death, are the result of shifting discursive constructions of death rather than any significant shift in the material phenomenon of biological death. As Laqueur states:

“Humans have never lived exclusively in nature; dying has always been culturally mediated”

(2015, 556). This cultural mediation is apparent in shifting attitudes to death, reflected in

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material spaces, such as how the cemetery represents change in the expression of

memorialization of the dead, or the existence of specialized death spaces such as funeral parlors instead of multifunctional spaces like hospitals or churches (Ariès 1991; Laqueur 2015).

Laqueur’s quote above also hints at a central tension in this thesis – the understanding of the human as in or out of nature. In the anthropocentric view, humans are a category unto themselves, a special entity above and beyond our origins in nature. The separation between human and nature engenders a superior selfhood in humans, by the denial of human animality and its associations to mortality. Anthropocentric subjectification processes push away its material dimensions, represented by for example the corpse, and clings to cultural symbolic systems of meaning as the place where the self truly exists (Becker 1973; Kristeva 1982).

Here, psychoanalytic processes of self-constitution assist in exploring the separation between selves as immaterial and primary, and bodies as material and secondary, which has

implications for how we approach death. I take anthropocentrism as one of the key mechanisms for making death unspeakable for the above reasons.

Moreover, the separation of nature and human begets gendered associations to selves and bodies (Plumwood 1991, 2012). The complicated processes that connect the body to nature institutes hierarchal selves that are then arranged in ranked gender structures, which prioritize the masculine above the feminine and tether female existence to the body

(Plumwood 1991; de Beauvoir 1989). From this ranking process arises a prime masculine subject that figures as particularly outside of nature, disconnected from the creaturely mortal body and its irrational whims, atomized and isolated (Plumwood 1991, 10). That subject is the aspirational Western/Global North self; the stand-in for what the essential human should be which collapses into what a human is. This is how gender and death are connected;

through a web of connections between concepts, a myriad of processes that constitute what we understand as death also relate to how we understand gender, and vice versa.

In this discussion, I rely on the premise that there are specific gendered processes of subjectification that makes the impact of death unequal. By this, I mean that the dimensions of being human that are not associated with the Western/Global North self—those that define

‘otherness’—are erased from the disappearance of that self, too. Death becomes a moment of the Western/Global North self, not of the individual and their specific aspects. Death

becomes one thing – the disappearance of that ideal self. Transhumanism in particular acts upon this assumption, that death is the end of the meaningful self, which is conceived of as a great evil because transhumanism is concerned with advancing these rational anthropocentric

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selves. In contrast to transhumanism, I am concerned with dismantling this self as a way to redress inequality that arises from the death taboo. Rather than death being a moment of human potential disappearing and therefore a thing to ‘fight’, I am concerned with the unequal ways that disappearance comes to us because we deny the complexity of death, a concern I share with death positivity. The possibility of collapsing dualisms, such as nature/culture and self/body, provide a basis for shaking the ground of the masculine universal self that gives rise to the erasure of difference in death. To this purpose, I use feminist posthumanism, particularly Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘staying with the trouble’

from her 2016 book of the same name, which implores us to resist dualism and simplified boundaries between selves and others. Staying with the trouble is to dismantle boundaries such as nature and culture to make “’naturecultures’–as one word-implosions of the discursive realms of nature and culture” (Haraway 1999, 105). I also draw on Val Plumwood’s ecofeminism, which suggests that ways forward into the future exist in

embracing these unbounded connections to make sustainable relationships between humans and nature with death, not despite death.

I take the guiding concepts mentioned before—‘the body’, ‘nature’, ‘self’—as discursively constructed, and furthermore utilized by transhumanism and death positivity in another discursive grapple for defining power over the is-ought of death. This is to answer the question of what the feminist implications of death being gendered might be; to explore how we might imagine alternative ways of conceiving death that are not founded upon erasure of difference and the priority of a particular humanity at the expense of the rest of existence.

1.2 What is at stake? “Real world” ramifications

The “real world” material effects of anthropocentrism are environmental changes that are already causing, and will continue to cause, mass death. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, released a report in 2018 that credibly predicts hitherto unprecedented global scale issues following anthropogenic (human-made) global warming. The report states that climate change “represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet” (IPCC 2018, 79), the fallout of which can be “major heatwaves on all continents, with deadly consequences in tropical regions”

(280), “elevated rates of food insecurity, hunger and poverty” (280), deforestation and biomass reduction (264), to mention some. Likewise, another UN body comprised of 132 countries, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem

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Services (IPBES), released a report in 2019 on anthropogenic impact on the Earth. They state in their media release of the report that

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential,

interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Prof. Settele [about the conclusions of the report]. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.” (IPBES 2019)

A third report about insect prevalence predicts “dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades” (Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019, 8). Anthropogenic climate change already has, and will continue to affect both human and non-human spheres in the world catastrophically. Donna Haraway (2016) uses the term Anthropocene, originally from the 1980s, to qualify just how much humans have impacted the world: “atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen […] propose[d] that human activities had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the use of a new geological term for a new epoch” (44). The enormity of the predicted loss—in the form of death—that will happen is difficult to underscore, and the ramifications are dire.

Mass death of both ourselves and others—both in the sense of human others, not ourselves, not our in-group; and in the sense of the non-human—is both possible and probable, given the conclusions of the aforementioned reports. Encountering these

predictions, it is difficult to imagine that death can remain taboo. Death is likely to spill out of its culturally designated spaces and challenge the invisibility that clouds the phenomenon as of now, as it becomes epidemic beyond the scope of the institutions we have to handle death. Death will make itself known, despite our cultural mores designed to keep it at bay, and we cannot hope to remedy these predicaments politically unless we acknowledge that they are problems in the first place. We will have a problem of death, materially as the

tangible consequences of death become visible, and philosophically as these material realities challenge our established refusal of their originator—death. Still, the IPBES report media release indicates that we need not give over to despondence yet. IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson, stated at the release that

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“Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” (IPBES 2019) What can these transformative changes look like? How do we meet these changing world situations? Who gets to be the representatives of the future and the transformative change that is so desperately needed? One aspect of this is how to deal socially with possible impending mass death, and the material, substantial impact of these deaths. Another is how it will challenge and confront our understandings of death as they are today, how we conceptualize mortality, especially human mortality and the mortality of our Selves, capital S.² This self is a highly gendered structure despite its claim to universality, and has implications for how we imagine identity in relation to death. I take for granted that anthropogenic climate change is connected with anthropocentrism and the prioritization of that self, and I position myself against that as a question of feminist critique of power. The ethical ramifications of unequally distributed power for othered individuals in meeting with eco-crises necessitates an active relationship to death. In light of increasingly prevalent ecological disasters, embracing sustainable death attitudes and practices is more important than ever, something especially death positivity is concerned with.

1.3 Selection and methodology

In this thesis, I use the two movements transhumanism and death positivity to examine the ways in which we can say that understandings of death are gendered, and what some consequences of that might be. Transhumanism and death positivity represent two possible ways (rather than the definitive ways) of approaching death in gendered ways, as I will argue in subsequent chapters. The two movements both work with what we might call the future of death, but in highly disparate ways. The stories they weave about what death is now and ought to be in the future are quite distinct. Even though neither movement is what we might call mainstream, they still reflect certain currents in general perceptions of death.

Transhumanism in particular seems to align with popular ideas of what the future might look like despite its radical technologies that sometimes are alienating to a general public. This is because it is influenced by historical and fictional visions of the future, and because many of

2 This type of self does not refer to a particular, individual self, but rather the ideal self cultures construct.

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its participants work in areas where considerable power is concentrated, such as the Google

“biotech subsidiary Calico” and “Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute” (O’Connell 2017, 7, 11). The latter, for example, “actively advises governments and industry leaders on AI

strategy” (Future of Humanity Institute 2019). As such, transhumanism is both inspired by existing ideas and influence ideas of future technologies. There also appears to be a widening scope of interest for death positive technologies and ideas due to an increased presence of death caused by global economic, environmental and human disasters (La Corte 2019). I use these as cases for representing and analysing how gender influences understandings of death at a discursive level. This is an important distinction; I do not mean to assert that the two represent the definitive ways of approaching death and gender, but they allow a meta-level analysis of different discourses of gender in death to be explored.

I have chosen the material for this thesis based on what I perceive to be parallel interests for transhumanism and death positivity expressed in similar ways, first and foremost through manifestos and summarized or itemized lists of central ideas. Both movements are relatively amorphous, which makes it challenging to pick a representative selection of texts.

Thus I use two main texts to structure the chapters about the two movements, the

“Transhumanist Declaration (2012)” (Various 2013) and the tenets of death positivity (Order of the Good Death 2019d). Whereas one is explicitly a declaration, the other is “a way to boldly state your intentions and participation” (Order of the Good Death 2019d) by signing a digital pledge. The declarative intent in these texts allow me to discern central ideas that the movements take as foundational about themselves. They are inherently delineating and performative, revealing central ideas of the movements and the relationship the movements have to these ideas. A declaration is intentional, directed to an audience with the purpose of making itself explicitly known, whether recipients are in agreement with its assertions or not.

If texts are speech acts, the declaration format is shouting. These play rhetorical and informational roles in defining the movements, discursively positioning the movements as having something important to say.

While the declarations make for relevant material based on the above reasons, the format also restricts some of my discussion. I am dependent on the format and the order the movements choose to represent their ideas in, which poses a challenge for thematic sorting of the ideas. I am interested in how connections of certain concepts inform the movements, which I then need to infer from other material written about the central topics that come up in abridged forms in the statements or tenets of the declarations. The set structure of the tenets can therefore become repetitive when it comes to how they relate to the central concepts –

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‘nature’, ‘the body’, ‘self’ – but I take these reiterations as proof of the centrality of the concepts to the movements because the declaration format is intentional. Additionally, these underlying assumptions or structures are not always explicitly apparent, which entails having to speculate or read broader into the movements in order to understand certain elements.

Some of the challenge of this thesis lies in how to structure my arguments in sound ways, which I discuss more in 1.3.4. “Positionality and choice of material”. I consider the declarative format as sufficiently interesting because of its representational value, but I do find it necessary to bolster and contextualize the assertions found therein with cross- references to other texts written about the themes by or about transhumanism and death positivity.

1.3.1 What is transhumanism?

Transhumanism is concerned with transcending the human. In effect this means that

transhumanism seeks to “apply technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage” (More 2013b, 4), and to advance human development to this end in a myriad of ways. Notable transhumanist Max More clarifies the term by asking readers to

[...] think of transhumanism as “trans-humanism” plus “transhuman-ism”. From here comes the emphasis on progress [...], on taking personal charge of creating better futures [...] [based] on reason, technology, scientific method, and human creativity rather than faith. (More 2013b, 4)

This explanation of transhumanism shows two things: one, that it is concerned with moving

‘beyond’ the human; and two, that it is an -ism, a particular set of ideas about how that moving beyond should manifest. That means that transhumanism as a movement espouses certain understandings of the human, one of which is the human in relation to death (More 2013a; More 2013b; Various 2013³; de Grey 2013). In fact, death is a very central concern of transhumanism, often conceived of as the key problem to being a ‘natural’ human. Even in the short quote above, we can distinguish tendencies to how a transhumanist ‘solution’ to death would look. Through rational action and novel use of technology and science, the self- made human can overcome a naturalized destiny to become something new, beyond what humanity has achieved so far.

3 See note about reference in bibliography.

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It is important to note More’s ‘emphasis on progress’ in the above quote. Everyday technologies that are more or less taken for granted at this time in the West/Global North, such as electricity, radio and phone technologies, advanced medicine, etc., are not seen as part of the ‘moving beyond’ of transhumanism. Why is this? One, because a definition that includes these would be so banal as to encompass most modern era technologies and would therefore be unworkable by sheer scope. Modern technologies are not attributable to this (or maybe any) distinct set of ideas that has been operational from the 1990s; rather,

transhumanism has co-occurred with and developed alongside the increasing speed and scope of twentieth century technology. Two, to include these more ‘common’ technologies would also complicate the notion of progress that transhumanism operates with, as it does not serve transhumanist goals of radical departure beyond the ordinarily human. Because

transhumanism is radically futuristic in its concerns, and therefore already developed and entrenched technologies are not necessarily interesting to transhumanism other than as springboards toward even more radical technologies. The technologies transhumanism is interested in are radical in the way that they are discordant with socially acceptable uses of technology per now, especially breaching the barrier of technological enhancements of the human body. The technologies are also radical in that they might not be developed even beyond an idea stage, yet are taken within the transhumanist discourse as ought-to-be inevitable occurrences of technological development in the future. An example of this is the idea of the Singularity, which denotes the moment “machine intelligence greatly surpasses that of its human originators, and biological life is subsumed by technology” (O’Connell 2017, 70). These kinds of hypotheticals and potentials inform transhumanist philosophy to a large degree.

In chapter 3, I will examine the way transhumanists regard the role of death in their mission for human progress. One of the key interests of this thesis is exploring possibilities for how to approach futures with a view to the aforementioned predicted mass death, and transhumanism is an important agent that works to create imagined futures. While the particular contents of “transhuman-ism” may be radical and controversial, it is often presented as the alternative futurist project, and many of its ideas and proponents are prevalent in places of power and influence, like Silicon Valley (Keep 2017) and the

aforementioned projects through Google or Oxford University. Through this thesis, I wish to suggest an alternative future vision that embraces the possibility of death—the material and social ramifications of it—alongside new technologies and radical changes in thought: death positivity.

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Death positivity is an awareness movement for death, where much of its activity is based in online activism. The term death positivity is inspired by other positivity movements such as body positivity and sex positivity (Doughty 2018a), and communicates a wish to turn a socially unaccepted phenomenon into a socially embraced one. The movement is defining itself in opposition to a presumed negativity, which is essential to understanding the crux of death positivity. The death positive website-hub The Order of the Good Death (hereafter also the Order), which I take as representative for central death positive ideas, describes itself and its mission statement as follows:

ABOUT THE ORDER

The Order of the Good Death is a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality. (Order of the Good Death 2019a)

The negativity that death positivity positions itself against is explained as death phobia. The death positive mission statement is to challenge this phobia because death is and should remain a facet of being human. This view is antithetical to the progressive mission of

transhumanism. Although far from all death positivity is part of the Order, the term arose as a part of mortician and Order originator Caitlin Doughty’s activism work. Doughty’s activism centers on confronting death as taboo, and she has written two books—The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2014) and From Here to Eternity (2017)—about her engagement with death personally and professionally. Both books deal with cultural attitudes and perceptions of death. The former is centered on Doughty herself and the reflections she makes in becoming a death professional in the American context; the latter incorporates different countries’

distinct deathways as Doughty experiences them through a kind of worldly death pilgrimage.

Death positivity is therefore not only placing its views of death in relation to Western/Global North deathways, but this sphere is the place from and in where death positivity seeks to change death.

In addition to defining the central concern of death positivity, the above quote delineates the defining participants of the movement. The death positive movement, as exemplified by the Order, is more split between grassroots level activism and scholarly work than transhumanism, although it also contains contributions based in academia and by academics. This is significant for the kind of movement it believes itself to be, and for what kind of people it attempts to be for. Death positivity takes an active stance to questions of

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justice in death, particularly for marginalized populations, those marked by difference. I will be looking at the ideas of death positivity in chapter 4.

1.3.3 Discourse and social construction

In this thesis, I am looking at these two distinct discourses—death positivity and

transhumanism—that exist parallelly, revolving around the same phenomenon, but whose interactions and overlappings are limited and sometimes even hostilely opposed. The movements’ work vie for definitional power of the same ‘thing’, death, yet they do not employ the same types of means to achieve it, nor for similar reasons.

Discourse theory is a social constructionist approach (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 4) to understanding how meaning-making activities function. Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips define discourse (simplified) as “a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)” (1 [italics original]). They underline that there is no definite discourse theory but rather many ways to approach and understand these pockets of knowledge creation, but central to the term is the way it constructed in social relations. Two main distinctions within discourse arise, however, suggested by Carol Bacchi. One she calls discourse analysis, which is based on a “social psychological focus on patterns of speech”

(2005, 199). The other is analysis of discourses, which is based in “a political theoretical focus” on the social nature of meaning-making, “united by the project of identifying and analysing discourses within texts” (199). Bacchi differentiates between the two approaches as a matter of identifying how a subject is positioned in discourse, “as discourse users or as constituted in discourse” (200). This distinction matters because the subject is either given full agency or little agency; Bacchi argues that feminist research should be keeping an eye to both ways in which we are users of discourse as well as how we are used by discourse (207).

The existence of hegemonic (dominant) discourses that are powerful at systemic levels—such as femininity and masculinity, suggests Bacchi—does not preclude the possibility of

individual agential action within those discourses (201). We are neither fully slaves to nor masters of the social constructions we are part of.

Fundamentally, social constructionism assumes that meaning is made in social constellations, that it is constructed through the particular cultural and historical ways people interact. There is no inherent meaning in things in and of themselves, there is no essential quality of things that can reveal what they are. This is an assumption given by discourse theory’s origins in structuralist and post-structuralist linguistic philosophy, from which comes

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the assertion that “our access to reality is always through language” (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 8), and that the relation between concepts and their real phenomenon is arbitrary (9- 10).⁴ If concepts are arbitrary in their relationship to the real, they are also revealed as not necessarily static and can be liable to change. The shifting potential of concepts is

particularly shown through its temporal relations, described in the poststructuralist linguistic tradition as the idea of the diachronic and synchronic. Diachronic refers to the history and synchronic refers to the contemporaneous use of that word (Hawkes 2003, 8-9, 15). The diachronic dimension of a word is the linear genealogy, the chronology of the word as it has existed in different iterations, and the synchronic is its particular iteration at a place in time.

Essentially, these two terms illuminate how meaning can exist both historically through time and specifically in time. This is important for substantiating my claim that death can be highly ‘real’ yet socially determined. I am looking at the synchronic struggle to define death in ‘my’ time, but I try to use diachronic considerations of death to show that there is no universal or timeless ‘death’, that this very real phenomenon is nevertheless discursively constructed. This has implications for my discussion of how transhumanism and death positivity understand death, especially for the values of death that transhumanism operates with where death is a lack in a static conception of human nature. I am using these terms here to illuminate how the contents of a phenomenon such as ‘death’ can be socially constructed;

‘death’ is not one thing, rather a myriad of contentions are hefted onto this word that contains and represents the end of life. That the meaning and value of ‘death’ is contested should not be surprising as death is maybe one of the true constants and universals of existence, but it is nonetheless important to interrogate those meanings and their implications for things such as remedying inequality.

In The Social Construction of Death (2014) Leen van Brussel says that we

cannot deny the fact that death has a clear materialist dimension in the sense that it is an event/process/moment that exists and occurs independently from human will, thought and interpretation. At the same time, we need discourses — and the notion of discourse refers both to ‘big D’ discourses as culturally shared systems of meaning and ‘little d’ discourses as talk and interaction [...] to make sense of the material. (Van Brussel 2014, 2)

4 I am simplifying here to not get too deep into linguistics, but the relationship between sign, signified and signifier can be found in Hawkes (2003, 13) and Jørgensen and Phillips (2002, 9-10) as cited elsewhere in this thesis.

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Van Brussel makes a distinction between what levels of interaction discourses can exist on similarly to Bacchi. She distinguishes between these as constructionist and constructivist, where the former (big D) is focused on “collective structures of meaning” and the latter (little d) on “the agency of groups and individuals in generating meaning” (2014, 4). More

importantly, Van Brussel connects the way things are discursively produced and their ‘real’

dimension. If the meaning of death was given by its materiality, there would be no discussion of how to die well, or maybe not die at all, or afterlives or lack of such. That the real,

material, extant, of ‘death’ is universal does not mean that its associations and given contents are, which I have already touched upon in the summaries of death positivity and

transhumanism. Keeping in mind that the production of meaning happens socially, both in the sense of discourse analysis and analysis of discourse, allows me to investigate how the

concept of ‘death’ is interpreted and utilized in the two movements, without abnegating the

‘real’ and material of death.

Van Brussel asserts that “a discourse-theoretical framework, with its focus on the construction of meaning within a sphere of a struggle for hegemony” (2014, 30) is

particularly suited for analyzing different iterations of death. She says this of her work, which analyzes individual interpretations of ‘the good death’. I am not engaging with the content of what a ‘good death’ is as such, despite drawing inspiration from Van Brussel, but rather how the concept of a good death and its valuation is interpreted and employed in the discursive struggle between transhumanism and death positivity. My research has lead me to think that for the death positive, the good death allows a sense of autonomy and self, while not causing harm to others or the Earth; for transhumanists, the good death is the one you can survive.

Through using these two different discourses I will attempt to pry loose some underlying assumptions and constructions of gender that shape how we (can) think about death.

I am, for the sake of argument, referring to transhumanism and death positivity as makers of self-contained discourses. This is a simplification, because both movements are more complex than that. The movements operate on various discursive levels, i.e. they both reach into grassroots activism to accomplish their goals through ‘little d’ discourses as well as philosophical and intellectual work and its relation to mainstream ‘big D’ discourses of death.

The points between participating in activism and academics are parts of a sliding continuum as well, and what is purely activist versus purely academic or ideological work is not so easily discerned. I largely take the movement’s self-constituting texts as my empirical

material, but the movements are also interesting for how their philosophical work impact real

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world handling of death. Both movements have had impact on policy-making and research initiatives, as well as on the level of particular individuals and their handling of death in private lives (Doughty 2017; Future of Humanity Institute 2019a; Kirk 2019; La Corte 2019;

O’Connell 2017). There is no obvious separation between the two movements in how they employ their work to exert normative power in defining death, although their approaches to enacting that power is different.

What does comparing death positivity and transhumanism give us? The two overlap in their concerns, but deal with death in vastly differing ways. This difference highlights the ways doing death can be done, and which perspectives are vying for dominance in how we should see death. One of the postulates of death positivity is that death itself is curiously absent and invisible in everyday situations and discussions. This is even despite the fact that death is a large part of for example media in coverage of wars, natural disasters and personal tragedies. It is a common and everyday occurrence, but it is not treated as if it is mundane, and we need to (partially) embrace it for it to cause less harm, according to death positivity.

Transhumanism, on the other hand, approaches death as a phenomenon unto itself that is lacking resistance from the mainstream—too many readily accept death as a necessary facet of the human condition. Comparing the two movements also highlights a third discourse of death. If we can talk about a gap between the two discourses of death positivity and

transhumanism, this gap is a silent absence which throws the two into stark contrast both with each other and the void in-between. There is a third discourse that is implicated in this gap, a prevailing understanding of death as taboo, unspeakable. This mainstream discourse of death becomes a third position that both death positivity and transhumanism define themselves against, even as they are definitionally opposite to each other. Both transhumanism and death positivity take for granted that we do not discuss death as we should—they position

themselves as counter-discourses to a dominant narrative they find unsatisfactory. The result of appropriately considering death is what is at stake for the two movements. Comparing of the two movements will allow me to examine the potential problematic inferences of the transhumanist understanding of the human, the world, and death as based on the

anthropocentric subject. And conversely, presenting the alternative of death positivity to help thinking in different directions when it comes to what relationships we can have with death in a precarious future.

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This thesis deals with big questions that also have meaningful repercussions. Consequently, I want to highlight some of the active choices I have made when it comes to my relationship to the methodology, selection of material and theory. While I aim to suggest ways to think with gender to dislodge difficulties that result from death, I am writing from a privileged position without any imminent threat of mortal violence or death by disease. My relationship to death is bridged by theoretical observations, and the limited experiences I have had with death are characterized by the very distance I am trying to challenge. I am thus not without

positionality in this discussion, and in fact, I would argue that I take a quite perceivable stance through what is and is not valuable for the thesis and beyond the thesis for ‘the real world’. I am able to advocate for the necessity of embracing death precisely because I am not continually threatened by it; my life is not an urgent struggle to stay alive, but rather a life where death is curiously absent and only incidental. Even so, I am not writing this thesis for the voyeuristic consumption of the spectacle of death, because I believe there are very real problems with the anthropocentric in death that can be, if not resolved, at least challenged by the kinds of thinking the theory in this thesis suggests.

One of the struggles of this thesis lies in the circular implications of my theory and empiricism. What should come first to properly explain the problems and potentials of death, and the way it shapes our understandings of the world, nature, bodies, gender, ourselves?

Many of these concepts are dependent upon each other, simultaneous and co-occurring. This is also partially why I find Haraway’s concept ‘staying with the trouble’ illuminative. As I am advocating for staying with the trouble as a method of handling the difficulty of death, I am also implicated in the ways these concepts trouble each other, mutually propping each other up in a system of meaning and interpretation. Death, gender, nature, the body are all

phenomena that are both material and social, and these dimensions are not easily detangled from each other. I want to remark that I rely on dualisms in my discussions of many of the tensions that show between transhumanism and death positivity, which I try to base in the dualisms that the movements themselves prop up. Still, this is somewhat contrary to the

‘staying with the trouble’ that I advocate.

When writing about death there is a well of potential choices to be made about whose deaths, whose recounting of it, the when and the where and the how; the entanglement of meaning that can be linked to death is incomprehensibly vast. Even 700 pages were not enough for Laqueur to write about the social importance of the dead, as per the opening epigraph (2016, xiv). The idea that death is a large field of multiple meanings is ‘common

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sense’, as it were, but it is also an understanding I have come to by diving into thanatology and cultural studies of death. It matters that we recognize the plurality of death not just on the basis of ‘common sense’ but on descriptions of the ways the phenomenon is palpably

understood and done in different ways. One of the arguments I am making in this thesis is that death is often taken to be singular in its meaning—as disappearance of the self—based on other ‘common sense’ Western constructions, the subject in this case, which inhibits the possibility of recognizing how death affects humanity and its others unequally. Death becomes a moment of personal tragedy, or even human tragedy in transhumanist

understanding, rather than an aspect of life that is affected by the ways difference shapes lives (in addition to being a personal tragedy).

As indicated above, I take an understanding of a universal subject as a central premise for much of my argumentation. This is partially because much of the theory and empirical material in this thesis is Anglo-centric, mostly from the United States. Death positivity as a movement is largely based in the Western/Global North Anglosphere, the U.S. and U.K.

specifically, as are the most prominent transhumanists. These operate with an anthropocentric kind of subject as their general referent, even as they align with or are in opposition to it. I make some choices about the universal applicability of the theory I have chosen, despite my rejection of certain values of universalism. This is not because I believe that every

geographical place shares the same view of or have analogous manifestations of death, but that every place has death. Here, I align myself with Thomas Laqueur’s “cosmic claim: [that]

the dead make civilization on a grand and an intimate scale, everywhere and always” (2015, 11). The unifying universal is death, and so the differing understandings of death that I will consider in this thesis are applicable in the sense that they are discourses that contain a commonly recognizable referent. I do believe that transhumanism and death positivity succinctly distill certain ideas about or views of how to deal with death, and therefore the insights we can arrive at from comparing these can be of general interest, even if the movements themselves are particular.

Another reason why I wanted to write this thesis is because I have yet to encounter death as a topic in my time in gender studies. Where is death as a general phenomenon in feminist theory? I have been taught about death, but then in the context of abortion, inheritance inequality, or violence against women or marginalized populations, never as a phenomenon unto itself. Gender studies covers iterations of gender from the moment before conception, early life and childhood, puberty, sexuality and reproduction, self-understanding, work-life, pension, old age, but so far very little is said about death. This is obviously a

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knowledge gap that needs to be bridged. This, perhaps, reflects the taboo or unspeakable nature of the topic, which I want to challenge through feminist impulses for why we should consider the phenomenon death per se. Writing this thesis has also been an attempt at doing this work, dispelling the taboo by writing a text that forefronts death.

1.4 Thesis structure

This thesis seeks to examine in what ways death can be considered gendered, and what some implications for justice that might have. The already covered chapter presents the ‘real world’

case for why to think about death, and gives an impetus for going in a different direction. I present the two movements that constitute my lenses to explore the gendering of death through, especially by way the concepts ‘nature’, ‘the self’, and ‘the body’. This chapter also presents methodological approaches and choices I make, and for what reasons, why and how to consider death as materially and socially constructed.

The theory chapter consists of two parts. The first part, encompassing 2.1, provides a background for how to understand death as a discursively constructed phenomenon. These connect the material aspects of death with its social aspects, through ‘nature’, ‘body’ and

‘self’, and reveal different histories of death and how these work to shape understandings of being human. The second part of this chapter, encompassing 2.2 and 2.3, discusses how to understand death by feminist and gender theories. I use Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the other and Julia Kristeva’s concept the abject as a way to understand gendered embodiment, subjectification processes and their relation to death. I also draw on ecofeminism and feminist posthumanism to discuss how nature, gender, the self and death influence each other in mutual constitution. Val Plumwood and Donna Haraway provide reasons to resist centering certain values of humanity, and point to possible ways forward that can be remedial to a precarious future.

Chapters 3 and 4 consitute the empirical material of this thesis. These sections cover some background for the transhumanist and death positive movements, what type of thinking these align with, and what and who they seem to be for. I present their central ideas through discussing the contents of the “Transhumanist Declaration (2012)” and the death positive pledge found on the website The Order of the Good Death, and supply these with other texts that define the movements. I argue that transhumanism represents a continuation of the anthropocentric subject, and is centered on avoidance of death as represented by the natural and the embodied in a gendered way. I suggest death positivity as an alternative way of

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understanding the human and death, to challenge the status quo that at least partially contributes to anthropogenic climate change.

In chapter 5, I consider some common themes and tensions between transhumanism and death positivity, seen through their use of concepts ‘nature’, ‘the self’ and ‘the body’, and gender. I find that chaos and order, positivity and optimism, harm and harm reduction, and the future are part of the movements’ discursive struggle for definitional control of death.

Chapter 6 restates my guiding research questions, how I understand and answer my findings in relation to these. I indicate some potential projects and alternative angles that could be fruitful to inform further investigations of the movements.

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2 Background and theory

I have so far prefaced why writing about death, despite its ever-present ubiquity, is

particularly necessary now, in this time of the Anthropocene, and how I’m going about it.

Death is a fundamental and central condition of existence, and it will be especially important, in light of possible and probable environmental disaster, to acknowledge this in those places where death remains unspeakable. I do not mean to say that there are cultures in which death does not exist, but rather that death remaining a taboo subject matter, as it does, needs challenging. If the future will be deadly, there is nothing to be gained in not confronting death. In the following chapter, I will provide some background for how we can talk about death as discursively constructed and material at the same time. I will also delineate theory that illuminates how gender can and does figure in understandings of death, through the concepts ‘the body’, ‘the self’ and ‘nature’. One of my claims is that death in the Western/Global Northern imagination is individualized to such an extent that gender is understood to not play an important role in its construction. I argue that gender can, in fact, play a significant role in how death is understood, because of the unequal impact of

necropolitics, and through acknowledging this we are empowered to respond to death in ways that are less fraught with discomfort and avoidance, and do us less harm. Examining

understandings of death as both synchronic and diachronic helps to understand that death is not one thing, with one history, and that it can be approached in new ways.

2.1 Social, material, psychological: death as a contingent phenomenon

Because death is such an amorphous and slippery concept, I make some choices as to what death means in the context of its construction. There are multitudinous fields of death research; thanatology, or the study of death, exists in the medical sciences, as palliative care or forensics, the arts and literature, in the anthropological studies of death customs, in philosophical considerations of how we should think about death and whether we should accept death as necessary at all. For this thesis, I am, for example, not looking at the concept of death for the dying individual or in palliative care, except when I reference elements of what is understood to constitute the well of meaning that goes into ‘death’. I am similarly not looking at instances of murder or other violent death, but I will later be looking at an

understanding of death—transhumanism—that sees it axiomatically per se as violence. I

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consider death, rather, at a discursive level, where transhumanism and death positivity are sources for these discourses. I take death to be a signifier (Hawkes 2003, 13), a symbol with meaning, which contents’ are implicitly understood and imbued with certain values of our time, as well as a historical concept whose meaning and place in society has fluctuated significantly. Death is not and has not always been the same thing; death is not a static concept whose contents have universal applicability. This is crucial to understanding the potential for radical action that springs from death; using death as a productive initiator rather than an immovable obstruction makes imagining different (death) futures possible. To show how death is discursively, socially constructed, in addition to being a material-biological phenomenon, I introduce historical backgrounds for understandings of death below that have bearings for my further discussion of death. There are a number of histories about death as a cultural phenomenon, and while none can ever reflect the totality of death, I have selected three main understandings as my guides to how death is socially constructed by way of

‘nature’, ‘the self’ and ‘the body’. These are Philippe Ariès and periods of death, with emphasis on modern death as invisible; Thomas Laqueur’s material dead and their social value; and Ernest Becker’s psychological drives for denial of death.

2.1.2 Philippe Ariès and ‘The Invisible Death’

To historically situate understandings of death is to wrest from it any kind of rooting in ‘the natural’ as inevitable. Basing the claim that death is changeable in historical instances of death changing lets us see the relationship to death we do now is not given, and thus it is possible to reconsider and reimagine the relationship we might have with it.

Arguably most famous for making the claim that Western death has a particular history is thanatologist Philippe Ariès, for The Hour of Our Death (1991), a seminal historical and cultural work on death. In it, he proposes a chronological understanding of death beginning in the eleventh century and spanning to modern times, the late 1900s, although he implies the possibility that the history of death continuously stretches back to prehistory. His description of death is a diachronic one, a genealogy of death as it has taken on different forms and expressions through expressions in material culture. He emphasizes continuity between death’s different iterations, even though the central contents of those iterations change throughout time. This deep time investigation of death uncovers some common themes that death have been connected to it historically.

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According to Ariès, death has existed as distinct discourses in five periods, which have been characterized by different attitudes to four themes. These themes are “[...]

awareness of the individual[,] [...] the defense of society against untamed nature, belief in an afterlife, and belief in the existence of evil” (Ariès 1991, 603 [italics in original]). All four themes are contingent on each other in mutual construction, but their contents did not

necessarily shift simultaneously. The five periods are therefore sometimes overlapping in the content for one or more of the themes, such as the idea of an afterlife, but differing in one or more of the others. These four themes reflect the historical relationships people have had to the central concepts I use to structure this thesis, and these concepts are also apparent in transhumanist and death positive discourses. Accordingly, transhumanism and death

positivity are inheritors of death attitudes even as they seek to carve out ‘new’ ways of doing death, drawing on a history of attitudes that they position themselves alongside or against. I will discuss this further in the respective movement’s chapters. Out of these five periods, I am most interested in the one Ariès calls ‘The Invisible Death’ because this is the most recent period in time, and so has the most implications for the discursive field(s) transhumanism and death positivity define themselves against and work to exert control over.

The different themes Ariès uncovered are rooted in being human as it relates to death.

For example, the ‘evil’ of death has transformed throughout because of these different conceptions of being human in meeting with death. Ariès tells us that evil as a driving force, particularly associated with the devil in the Western/Global North conception, changed from a central opposition in religious and associated moral life to not being present anymore: “[sin, spiritual and moral evil] were no longer regarded as part of human nature but as social

problems that could be eliminated by a good system of supervision and punishment” (613).

Evil transformed from an agential force to unfortunate circumstances, subsumed in the

‘natural order’ of things that could be solved through social initiatives (610-613). Yet disease and death could not be made to disappear; these were re-packaged as tragedy, also

unfortunate but nonetheless ‘natural’ circumstances. This collapse of the evil and nature into each other imbued them with each other’s characteristics. “Death became dirty, and then it became medicalized” (612) through these changes that made systems of control, especially for social welfare, the arena of death.

The relationship between ‘the self’ and death was also changed by different attitudes to these themes. According to Ariès, the impact of a person’s death has ranged from being

“not a personal drama but an ordeal for the community, which was responsible for

maintaining the continuity of the race” (603) in its earlier iterations, to a personal drama that

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is nonetheless hidden from the dying person, determined by a “sense of privacy” (611) in what Ariès calls ‘The Invisible Death’. Insofar as death has indeed been seen as a tragedy, it has moved between being a personal tragedy and being a tragedy for a population, or the human in an abstract way. It is this development, from a public acceptance of sorts, although heavily ritualized, to the private concealment of death which constitutes the foundation for the disappearance of death and which transitions into the taboo of death (613). Death has disappeared, according to Ariès, not as a material occurrence, but as an acknowledged phenomenon in the public sphere. This disappearance occurred as death became less

associated with religious conceptions of evil and a disembodied self which sought an eternal afterlife. Resultantly, the sexular spaces afforded to death within funereal establishments became spaces solely for death in a way that the religious spaces had not been, as these were served other important life-rites. The increased specialization of deathways is central to how they became invisible, and the emergence of funeral homes/parlors “freed the clergy, the family, and the doctors or nurses of responsibility for the deceased in the church, the home, and the hospital” (599). This change is also motivated by profit, according to Ariès. He anchors this process in an American context, but claims that this is due to the particular nature of American market capitalism, making the process frankly apparent in that context, rather than profiteering from death being an exclusively American phenomenon (598). He states that

death occupied such a large place in the sensibility of the late nineteenth century that they became one of the most valuable and profitable objects of consumption. The phenomenon is characteristic of the whole Western world. (1991, 598)

Like Ariès does here, death positivity makes a claim about the character of Western deathways, despite relying heavily on American practices such as embalming. These processes are in their understanding also exacerbated by capitalist interest. The

understandings that Ariès outline have been shaped by the relationship between death and

‘the self’ as embodied or disembodied; it has even shaped the acknowledgement of human individuals as discrete units of selves, which is a modern way of understanding the human that we now take for granted. Whether or not a person can be said to be an individual with distinct selfhood has intimate connections to how it has been argued that people have rights per se, that the human has a value by merely existing. This also has implications for how we

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think questions of justice, whether that pertains to the human as a discrete unit, or the human as situated in, or otherwise continuous with nature.

Ariès’ theory of death has had a significant impact in thanatology because of the deep time-approach it takes. His assertions that death is invisible has purchase in the thinking of the death positive movement. Death positivity operates from the understanding Ariès outlines of death as invisible, and the movement works actively in opposition to taboo death as caused by its increased professionalization and medicalization. Here Ariès is one of the historical building blocks to the discourse that death positivity claims as their own. The most important factors for my discussion that arise from Ariès’ study of death is that death has a continuous history as a social phenomenon across time and the space ‘The West’, and that this history is apparent through his use of complex concepts such as nature, the self and its relation to the body.

2.1.2 Thomas Laqueur and mattering

There is no one history of death, but the ways humans have understood death has several histories. Understanding death as a historical, and therefore temporally situated, phenomenon has implications for dispelling the taboo of death, because it challenges the understanding of death as merely a biological incident, a disappearance, and it allows for discussion of the different ways one can do death. To this end, I use historian Thomas Laqueur’s work to illustrate that the way we understand death now is not a ‘natural’ consequence of death’s biological aspect and that the relationship between the material and social in death has a long history of contestation.

In The Work of the Dead (2015), Laqueur outlines a cultural history of death through looking at attitudes to the dead body. He does so through what he calls two time registers, one which is in the “deep time” (diachronic) anthropological of death and the other which is specific historical instances (synchronic) of deathways (5, 12). Laqueurs central claim is “that the work of the dead is to make culture” (13), and he outlines attitudes to the material and corporeal, of the corpse, as indicators of opinion on the more abstract ‘death’ concept. The dead body plays a vital part in defining timescapes, says Laqueur:

In the beginning was the corpse: lifeless matter from which a human had fled. [...]

[This book] is about why the dead body matters, everywhere and across time, as well as in particular times and particular places. [...] It matters because the dead make

UNDERTAKING GENDER IN DEATH